The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel

George Watt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317200796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

A sympathetic view of the fallen women in Victorian England begins in the novel. First published in 1984, this book shows that the fallen woman in the nineteenth-century novel is, amongst other things, a direct response to the new society. Through the examination of Dickens, Gaskell, Collins, Moore, Trollope, Gissing and Hardy, it demonstrates that the fallen woman is the first in a long line of sympathetic creations which clash with many prevailing social attitudes, and especially with the supposedly accepted dichotomy of the 'two women'.

This book will be of interest to students of nineteenth-century literature and women in literature.

1 Nancy

A sympathetic approach to fallen women in the nineteenth century, an approach which encouraged a revaluation of popular misconceptions, really begins in the novel. One of the earliest is Dickens's treatment of Nancy in Oliver Twist. This work was part of a fictional trend which liked to have crime and low life as its central interest. The 1830s saw a rise in interest about crime which was to become the Newgate novel in fiction. Bulwer Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth took advantage of the trend in their work, and were popular as a result. The fame of the former rests on Paul Clifford (1830), and that of the latter on Rookwood (1834) and Jack Sheppard (1839). Dickens's novel preceded Jack Sheppard by a few months, and was never quite so popular as it. Oliver Twist can only be considered a type of Newgate novel, but there is something in the spirit of the convention which is important when Nancy and her role are considered. In both Paul Clifford and Jack Sheppard the romantic hero is the criminal. The large numbers of supporting characters come from the slums of London. They can never match the courage, innate nobility and panache of the hero. The criminals in Oliver Twist are not romanticised to the same extent, nor are they the central interest of the novel.

The spirit to which I refer above is something to do with the penchant the Newgate novel had for reform and for questioning. Paul Clifford sets out to reform 'two errors in . . . [our] penal system; vis., a vicious prison discipline, and a sanguinary Criminal Code,—the habit of corrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him, and then hanging the man, at the first occasion, as the easiest way of getting rid of our own blunders.'¹ Paul's life of crime, the novel argues, is as much the fault of society as the fault of the hero. Jack Sheppard argues similarly, centring its ideas on Lytton's argument that 'Circumstances make guilt . . . '² Absolutes of right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice are all questioned by Ainsworth and Lytton. Neither, however, use this to highlight the social problems and the extenuating circumstances which ought to colour the attitude towards the fallen woman, prostitute or otherwise. This was left for Dickens to do. He applied the questioning spirit not to the male criminals in Oliver Twist but to Nancy and her plight. It is not surprising that a prostitute should ultimately figure in a type of novel which gleaned its host of characters from the low life of London—hey were not at all scarce. What Dickens challenges through Nancy's presence in Oliver Twist is the mistaken idea that a woman is either fallen or not, either totally corrupt or pure. Paul Clifford may well be the son of a harlot, but he can still be noble. Nancy might be a harlot, the companion of murderers and thieves, but she can still be essentially good. This germ of relativity was to grow in the minds of Mrs Gaskell, Collins and Hardy as the century progressed. Understandably and sadly it was always questioned.

By looking at two incidents from Sketches by Boz Dickens's sensitivity can be realised as it feels for all social outcasts. We can also know the figures who are Nancy's precursors. In 'A Visit to Newgate' Dickens describes a hardened prostitute. A recognition of the power of circumstances surrounding the woman reduces the condemnation he may have felt, and heightens his sense of charity:

The girl belonged to a class—unhappily but too extensive—the very existence of which should make men's hearts bleed, Barely past her childhood, it required but a glance to discover that she was one of those children, born and bred in neglect and vice, who have never known what childhood is: who have never been taught to love and court a parent's smile, or to dread a parent's frown . . . They have entered at once upon the stern realities and miseries of life, and to their better nature it is almost hopeless to appeal ... ³

The compassion Dickens felt to the type is further developed in a later sketch, 'The Hospital Patient', which was to provide the embryo for the Nancy–Bill relationship. Dickens always insisted that Nancy is true to life. He records accompanying a magistrate whose job it was to try a man charged with brutality. The object of his brutality was hospitalised and could not attend the trial. The court came to the hospital ward to question the victim. The woman did her best to hide the wounds, and insisted that the clearly guilty offender was innocent:

'Oh, no, gentlemen', said the girl, raising herself once more, and folding her hands together, 'no, gentlemen, for God's sale! I did it myself—it was nobody's fault—it was an accident . . . '⁴

Despite being warned that he would be convicted in any case, and despite the fear of perjury, being so close to death herself, the girl continued to be loyal to her man:

'Jack', murmured the girl, laying her hand upon his arm, 'they shall not persuade me to swear your life away. He didn't do it, gentlemen. He never hurt me.' She grasped his arm tightly, and added, in a broken whisper, 'I hope God Almighty will forgive me all the wrong I have done, and the life I have led. God bless you, Jack. Some kind gentleman take my love to my poor old father. Five years ago, he said he wished I had died a child . . . '⁵

Perhaps the vocabulary used by the dying woman was 'edited' by Dickens, and this may make the scene a little implausible. It remains, nonetheless, an effective interpretation of a heartrending scene, effective because it encourages allowance for the fact that the fallen woman is capable of self-sacrifice.

Nancy follows the example of the woman in the hospital bed. But whilst Dickens includes this idea in Oliver Twist he does move beyond it to challenge another of the fallen-women myths which managed to gain a great deal of credence—this was the idea that women were the source of disease, moral pollution and degradation. In sexual matters men acted from natural impulse. That the Contagious Diseases Acts, mentioned in the Introduction, only allowed for venereal checks on women, confirms the existence of a legislative or political manifestation of the attitude mentioned above. A woman had to prove that she was a virgin, and that she was not a prostitute before she could refuse to undergo the compulsory, degrading tests. 'Literally and figuratively', writes Walkowitz in her fine study of Victorian prostitution, 'the prostitute was the conduit of infection to respectable society'. The world from which she came provided 'cheap labour and illicit pleasure', but at the same time led to common 'deep seated social fears and insecurities, most vividly expressed in the images of filth and contagion associated with the Great Unwashed'.⁶ Dickens does his best to reverse the attitude which blamed women for the corruption, by making her a pawn in the hands of Fagin and Sikes. Nancy was ruined before she had a chance to understand the meaning of the word. Nancy knows this when she meets Rose Maylie:

'Thank heaven upon your knees dear lady . . . that you had friends to keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and—and—something worse than all—as I have been from the cradle. I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my deathbed.'⁷

Nancy lives as she does, not because of innate depravity, but because Fagin's craft is too much to withstand. Corruption in Oliver Twist is male-engendered. To the modern reader this idea would not normally seem to be very important. The prevailing attitude which Dickens had to counteract suggests otherwise. Common reaction to the subject included ostrich-like avoidance (Lord Shaftesbury when questioned on prostitution 'knew little of it, and wished to know less'⁸), to evangelical ranters like William Bevan and J. B. Talbot who saw every sexual transgression as a threat to civilised living. Ironically these Christian leaders ought to have been the prostitutes' best friends. Talbot saw every fallen woman as one 'who seduces innocence and . . . [by] assuming appearances the most honorable paralyses authority and spreads with impurity the most frightful contagion and immorality the most flagrant'.⁹ Men are seldom mentioned by Talbot.

The newness of Dickens's claim through fiction that virtue and vice can mix in one character can be more easily realised by comparing Nancy's goodness with the common type of gangster's moll in another Newgate novel. Ainsworth, for instance, in Jack Sheppard confirms the idea that women are the source of moral pollution. It is subtly done, perhaps not even realised by the writer himself. Jack Sheppard's mother is very poor. His father was hanged early in Jack's life. The mother is too weak to withhold her son from the influence of the world of crime and poverty. The early crisis point in the novel comes when Jack is lured to the thieves' den. Mrs Sheppard follows him, intent on forcing him home, but is unable to do so. Poll Maggott and Edgeworth Bess, both women of questionable virtue, have a literal hold on the fifteen-year-old Jack. Their sexual wiles combine with the influence of alcohol to ensure Mrs Sheppard's lonely return home without her son. The source of Jack's corruption in the novel can be traced from this moment, when the two molls are 'the conduit of infection':

The agonized mother could scarcely repress a scream at the spectacle that met her gaze. There sat Jack, evidently in the last stage of intoxication, with his collar opened, his dress disarranged, a pipe in his mouth, a bowl of punch and a half-emptied rummer before him,—There he sat receiving and returning the blandishments of a couple of females, one of whom had passed her arm round his neck, while the other leaned over the back of his chair, and appeared from her gestures to be whispering soft nonsense into his ear.¹⁰

In this context Ainsworth and Talbot meet, the latter quite sure that 'Once a woman has descended from the pedestal of innocence, she is prepared to perpetrate every crime.'¹¹ When Jack finally sees the tragic end to his adventures, when he accepts there can be no reformation he recognises the women who were partly to blame for his downfall. 'Would I had never seen either of you!'¹² laments Jack when they profess their love and loyalty to him. Ainsworth's treatment of the fallen woman is the antithesis of Dickens's, who ultimately sees Nancy as a saving influence, not a corrupting one. Even the enlightened Tait, who was one of the first social scientists to study prostitution, could not see the possibility of change or reformation in the prostitutes' condition. He published Magdalenism: An Inquiry into the Extent, Causes, and Consequences of Prostitution, two years after Oliver Twist. He knew that the lack of reasonably paid work combined with overcrowding resulted in an increase in prostitution, but still felt that once fallen every woman 'abandoned the prerogatives of civil liberty'.¹³ It was not until 1857, nearly twenty years after Oliver Twist, that a social scientist tried to disagree with some of the myths Dickens questions in the novel. The permanence of the fall was the fallacy Acton tried to disprove in Prostitution Considered etc. Like Dickens he argues that the following were not always (or often) the case:

(1) Once a harlot, always a harlot.

(2) There is no possible advance, moral or physical, in the condition of the actual prostitute.

(3) The harlot's progress (decline) is short and rapid.¹⁴

In other words Acton questioned the prevailing myth of the 'two women' purported by writers and moralisers like Talbot and Mrs Wood. That this error is challenged by Dickens twenty years earlier makes it clear how advanced a social observer he really was. When he hoped 'to do great things with Nancy'¹⁵ he may have had the intention of dispelling ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Nancy
• 2. Ruth
• 3. Carry Brattle and Kate O'Hara
• 4. Mercy
• 5. Ida Starr
• 6. Tess
• 7. Esther Waters
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index